In the MWC Shanghai this year, 5G unquestionably takes the leading role. At the same time, the Internet of Things, as an important part for 5G, has been fully demonstrated by various major manufacturers. Various technologies for the Internet of Things are competing with each other, and NB-IoT undoubtedly is in the mainstream.
In last year's MWC Shanghai, NB-IoT was still in the phase of network construction, chip research&development and pre-commercial service. Nowadays, one year has passed and the three major operators have completed the preliminary construction of NB-IoT. For example, in Beijing, the three major operators have announced successively that NB-IoT has been commercially available. Terminals and networks are connected, and chips link to terminals. Among many NB-IoT chip manufacturers in the MWC Shanghai, MTK not only joined hands with China Mobile to launch the first batch of NB-IoT R14 terminal products, but also jointly announced the construction of an applied ecosystem with Ericsson.
You Renjie, vice-general manager of MTK and general manager of smart equipment business group, points out that there are three stages for the development of NB-IoT. The first stage is constructing chips, base stations and networks; the second stage is the commercial use of terminal products; next, with the maturity of the standard, the perfection of the network infrastructure and supporting policies, it will enter the take-off stage . “With one-year’s development, I think the work in the first phase has almost been completed, which means it has entered the second phase, namely the commercial use, vertical application and ecological system construction of the products. There are many solid applications in the exhibition. Then, it will quickly enter the take-off stage and next year will be a year with rapid growth of NB-IoT. "
At present, NB-IoT is mainly used in areas such as smoke detector, intelligent door lock, and bicycle-sharing, among which smoke detector was previously based on photoelectric technology and now widely adopts NB-IoT; at the very beginning, bicycle-sharing adopted 2G network and now is gradually switches to NB-IoT; at the very start intelligent door lock used Bluetooth technology and will fully adopt NB-IoT in the future. NB-IoT has the broad application prospects in the future featured by the advantages of ultra-low power consumption, wide coverage, and stronger signal penetration.